


my chains are broken

by reylo_garbagecan



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Ben Solo Pain Train, Ben solo needs love, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Forced Labor, Lots of Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 07:19:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14350629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylo_garbagecan/pseuds/reylo_garbagecan
Summary: After being liberated from a First Order labor camp in the aftermath of failing to quell General Hux's coup d'etat, Ben Solo- or Kylo Ren- is not the same man that Rey remembers. The once broad and muscular shoulders withered to bone, the once perfectly kept hair overgrown and dirty, the once clean-shaven jaw scruffy, and the eyes so much darker than they were before. With no one else willing to help the former warlord, Rey is tasked with piecing a broken man back together.





	my chains are broken

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter is me getting the angst out of my system, second chapter will be the fluff ;)

Rey pushed the glass of the cockpit out of her way to stand and stretch her cramped legs. She yawned, the time since she'd had good sleep a distant memory to her, and she eagerly wished that her time spent off the front lines of the steadily dying war would be spent in the confines of her cot. Partially to sleep, yes, but a piece of her needed more time to wallow. Each day the bond didn't hum distantly in her head was no better and so much more lonely than any day she stayed on the deserts of Jakku. It was over a year since the other end went silent- dead- and each day she mourned it in her own way. Wallowing, silence, forced smiles- and on the topic of forced smiles- Poe Dameron bounded up to meet her in the hangar. She forced her smile in greeting and made her way down the ladder of her X-wing. She opened her mouth to tease him in their usual banter but stopped upon seeing the determined, serious lines of his face.

"Rey," he breathed out, "we found him."

Her blood froze to an unmoving icy river in her usually hot-blooded veins, and she demanded rather than asked, "Where."

"We liberated a camp on one of the Core Worlds."

She nodded, thinking she understood. So, she thought, he had closed the bond and went to oversee a labor camp. It was low work for him and his abilities, and she could not make sense of it. Poe's eyes scanned her face, gauging her reaction. Rey carefully schooled her expression and attempted to hold her head high despite all the suffering he had put her through for a year and a half.

"So," her voice was uncharacteristically cold, "when will his fate be decided?"

Poe's eyes narrowed in confusion and his voice betrayed his bewilderment, "I think he's suffered enough, Rey. I don't think you understand.”

"Understand what? There clearly isn't anything to understand about him anymore."

He gently shook his head, "No, Rey. He was a prisoner."

Her skin prickled at a sudden shiver that made its way down her spine, and all she could manage to respond with was a breathless, " _Oh_."

Poe stammered on, hoping to elaborate more for her, "We don't know much, but we think when Hux took control, he was sent there as punishment. Like an example, or something. He hasn't got much favor in the Resistance, but for you and for Leia and for what help he did at least give us with Snoke, I think I can manage  _something_. It might be a temporary solution, and if you still want to save him, this is your chance."

Rey listened without emotion. There could be no emotion, or she would break. _Why did he break the connection_ , she wondered. She didn't even understand how it had happened. What she wouldn't have given over a year ago to understand how to do just that thing. It would have proven useless information to have anyway because Rey knew the dependency that she had developed on the connection, and how hollow and alone she had felt at the loss of it.

_He had carved a hole into her soul for himself, and when he left, he sliced his way out, leaving nothing for her but smoldering chars. Was he done with her? Was he dead? For days she ambled around the base spiritless, dejected, dead. She did not eat, she did not speak, and she did not sleep. A week later she woke up in the medical ward after a fainting episode to two very angry people who loved her very much. She had to tell them everything. Luke. The bond. The vision. The throne room. The maddening silence._

_Finn's voice had been quiet but earnest all the same, "He's not in your head anymore, Rey. Shouldn't you be- I don't know- happy?"_

_She had cried her first tears since the silence then. Messy sobs wrenched her body, and she folded in on herself. It was only Leia who had dared to wrap her in a maternal embrace and rock her gently back and forth to console the grief-stricken girl._

_Rey had blubbered into the General's scratchy vest, while Finn looked on bewildered and slightly uncomfortable, "Why do I feel so empty? Why does it hurt me?"_

_Leia's voice was hoarse and betrayed the emotion which she always held so deep within herself, "Because it meant something to you, darling."_

"Rey?" Poe stood before her with his hands, callused from his constant grip on a joystick, resting gently on her bare shoulders, "Rey, come back to me, okay?"

She shook her head, dazed from the memory, "What were you saying?"

The pilot stepped back, somewhat ungracefully, the relief at her not reverting back to her old habit of losing herself- which he could recall vividly- was palpable, "He asked for you."

Rey shrugged her shoulders, almost comically casual for the severity of the situation, "What are we standing here talking for then? Take me to him."

A nod, and then, "Understood, madame Jedi."

***

There was some mistake. The man- the skeleton- facing the wall of the cage, was neither Ben Solo nor Kylo Ren. Rey looked around the room of officers with grim expressions, searching for the joke. She was certain it was a trick. There had not been nearly so much bone protruding grotesquely from his skin the last time she had caught him without a shirt on. He had been almost confident, a wall of solid and rippling muscles as he had spoke to her then. Try as she may, Rey could not corroborate the two images with one another. It was a mistake. The man with his spine sickeningly poking out as he curled in on himself, back facing his audience, was decidedly  _not_  him.

Poe put a comforting arm around her shoulders, which she had not realized until then were trembling, and, "I know," was all he said.

At the sound of Poe's voice through the glass of his enclosure, the prisoner weakly tried to crane his head to peer at the new development. The movement was languid, utterly devoid of energy, but Rey had caught enough of a glimpse of his face to know. It was his nose and the small little beauty mark next to it that gave him away. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and Rey took a step forward.

A whisper, "Ben," and the prisoner heard it, having learned a long time ago to catch the whispers to survive.

He gave a pained groan in response that might have vaguely taken the shape of her name if she listened so very closely. All he could do was roll onto his back and give to her the blank stare of a man who had given up. Rey gasped. His features had always been stark and narrow, but this was something new altogether. He was gaunt, a ghastly shadow of who he once was. His sharp features always cast in such shadow, now dramatically so. The soulful dark eyes were only half the same. Just dark. Then her eyes fell to the shackles. Rey's head snapped to Poe, and his eyes fell away from her in shame. 

"The others were afraid of his reputation so we thought it best to leave the restraints we found him in on."

Her open palm slammed on the button that opened the door standing in between her and him, and she cried out as she rushed to his side, "For the Maker's sake, Poe, he isn't dangerous!"

Her knees burned as she slid across the stone and threw herself over him. He made no movement beneath her trembling form. Fingers shaking, she found the metal restraints, and instantly pulled away as if she had been shocked. Her brows furrowed as she tested the metal with her touch warily once more. She focused on opening the cuffs, but her gentle prod with the Force was rebuffed, and she also found that they had been welded shut around his wrists. All at once, she understood. 

His voice pulled her from her thoughts, it was sad croak of a voice, and she sadly mused that he must not have spoken very often where he had been before, "So now you know."

She sniffed and sat back on her heels, wiping her face of any traitorous tears, "Get me a droid, Dameron."

Poe's footsteps were the only signals that he had heeded her words. Rey looked down at Ben's wide eyes. He seemed like a cornered animal, yet resigned to anything just as well.

He whispered to her, his voice wavering, "Have you finally come to kill me?"

She let out a strangled cry and let her head fall to his shallow chest.

Rey hated how hopeful his tone was, "I saved myself. Just for you. They tried to, but I," he lifted a hand, shaking from the strain of movement, to the unmistakable scar on the side of his face, "I remembered whose I was."

"Please don't say things like that, Ben," she pleaded with him, "I won't hurt you. I want to put you back together."

He mused as she softly ran her fingers through his overgrown and tangled, black hair, “Still a scavenger.”

At that moment, Poe bounded back into the room with the ancient R2 unit rolling at his heels. Rey turned and gave a rueful smile in greeting to the blue-domed astromech. Poe nodded at her, being careful to stay well out of the cell. She turned her attention back to most present issue. The very cause of a year and a half of pitiful anguish. Somehow the shackles had been gifted with a Force-repellant nature that Rey had not even presumed possible. Each time she had touched them, she felt the Force painfully ripped from her, leaving a hollowness to her bones. Just like the day he went quiet.  _How could someone think of something so despicable and unnatural_ , she thought with a shudder.

"Artoo, do you think you can get through these restraints?"

At that, there was a great shout, and Ben went scrambling to the corner with his cuffed hands covering his face as he trembled. Rey's eyes went wide, and she turned to watch Artoo beep in uncertainty with a rotary cutting tool spinning from his metal body. She turned back to Ben and approached him with the caution that went into approaching a wild animal. 

"Ben, let me help you."

His voice was a choked sob, "Rey, _please_ , they were never meant to come off. Please understand."

"You aren't a prisoner anymore," she grabbed his hands as gently as she could, but to a comfort-starved creature, every touch was a shock, and he struggled away from her.

Rey felt Poe's presence wavering at the doorway, and she sharply told him, "Do not come in here, no matter what happens."

 The pilot backed away, and as quick as she could, Rey used the trick she had learned from Ben himself and froze him where he shook. She wriggled underneath his cuffed wrists, allowing his arms to wrap around her head. Her knees framed his hips, but she did not place any weight on him save the pressure of her hands on his chest. There wasn't much weight to Rey, but so it seemed that there wasn't much to Ben anymore either. Artoo arranged himself and the rotary blade between the frozen man's splayed legs to access the cuffs he was confined to. Rey blocked his vision of the small saw with her body, and attempted to soothe him even as he was frozen in place.

She smoothed her hands over his face as he cried and strained to break out of hold, which was impossible to do while he was cut off from the Force. Poe Dameron watched the scene with marked curiosity as the other observers left the room in disgust. From the open door, he could hear the mingling sounds of cutting through metal, desperate pleas, and the softest voice that Poe had ever heard before. 

"I was supposed to die in these, Rey."

"You're not going to die, Ben. I won't allow it."

"I'd rather die than feel everything again."

"Let me change your mind."

"Rey, _please_!"

The last word he spoke turned into a long wail as the restraints fell from his wrists, and the feeling of everything came rushing back into his body. Artoo whirred a foul string of curses in binary, and Poe shouted in fright as they both were lifted from the floor and floated as if they were in zero gravity. Rey remained hovering of her own free will over the unfortunate man as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut and cried out as if he were in pain. He, in fact, was not in pain. Strength returned to him, if only in mediocrity, but to become aware suddenly of _everything_ all at once is to feel every emotion and feeling, a very taxing thing on the human mind. Anguish warred with joy, disgust warred with contentment, hunger pains warred with fulfillment, hot warred with frigid, and the feeling of peace warred with the very feeling of being at war. Ben Solo's body housed all these contradictions, and his body became no longer his own, but every person on the Resistance's base crammed into one fragile frame. 

Then the pilot and the droid unceremoniously dropped to the floor as the feeling consumed his debilitated body, and Ben lurched forward with his eyes rolling into the back of his head.

***

He woke up with a feather light touch dancing on the skin of his cheek. Rey loomed over him but not imposingly, caressing his face back to consciousness. She smiled as he blinked his eyes back open and took in his surroundings with an air of calmness. He laid on a bed softer than any surface he had grown to know in over a year and felt cleaner than he had ever been in that same amount of time. His addled brain wrapped around the logistics behind such a thing, and the tips of his ears burned.

Rey understood what he was thinking through the finally opened bond and laughed, "No, I only washed what I could see with a rag. Poe got you into the clothes. I've seen nothing that I haven't already seen, I swear."

He didn't respond, just slowly blinked up at her like a specter fading in and out of existence. Her fingers brushed over the wiry scruff on his jaw.

"I could fix this if you'll let me."

A faint whisper of assent voiced itself through the bond despite no movement-aside from blinking-being made on his part. Rey smiled again and moved out from underneath his head gently to find the tools needed for her endeavor. Soon, his long hair was soaking in a bowl of water as she gingerly swept a blade over his throat and jaw and chin. Considering his earlier reaction to a sharp tool, Rey was shocked to find he made no move to jump away. 

When his face was smooth again, Rey lathered his hair in soap that was probably aimed towards women, given the faint hint of foreign flowers that she smelled, but she figured that he might still appreciate any smell so long as it was a pleasant one. He continued his ongoing staring contest with the ceiling as her fingers gently scraped over his scalp, but she could tell that something in him had relaxed. With his dark locks smothered in white bubbles and slicked away from his face, Rey couldn't help but notice how different he looked. It wasn't that he looked silly per se, but his face certainly had a boyish awkwardness to it. Never before had she seen his ears, endearingly large as they were. Unconsciously she swiped the tops of them with her thumbs, spreading the soap there too. Despite the coat of bubbles accidently placed there, Rey noticed a burning red shining through as mortification filtered through the bond.

His voice, the one she remembered smooth and unbroken, inside of her head startled her,  _I hate them._

Rey laughed, and they burned brighter still, "They're darling."

She rinsed the soap out of his hair and watched the white suds and black strands swirl together in exotic variations of symbols for balance,  _If it will make you happy, when I cut it, I'll leave them covered._

He audibly hummed in response, pleased with her statement.

After performing the best that she could at styling men's hair, she moved toward the door but was halted by Ben frantically grasping at her arm. It was the most movement that he had made when not goaded by her since his refusal to have his restraints removed. Curiously, she guided her eyes to the bony hand fervently latched to the crook of her arm, to the thin scars running around his wrists from metal digging excessively into the sensitive flesh there, to the ghostly pallid color of the skin of his arm, to the oddly conspicuous bone of his shoulder stretching against the flimsy and unraveling fabric Poe had gifted him, and finally, to the sheer terror that had possessed his once languid emotions expressed in his face. 

He spoke with his voice for the first time since whispering to her in the cell, it cracked and mortified him, but he pushed through regardless, "You are leaving me?"

Rey's expression fell to a peaceful sort of compassion, "I was going to bring you food. I know you have to be starving."

His grip loosened on her arm, but he did not let go, and his eyes widened in a youthful pout of longing, "I can go with you?"

With great care to be gentle, she brushed his hand away from her arm, and she spoke with inexhaustible measures of tenderness, "Commander Dameron and I have agreed that it would be best if you stayed in your room."

"My room," he repeated with reserved incredulity and the blankest of expressions.

Rey smiled as if she were smiling at a child, still in awe of the transformation of the man sitting before her, "Yes, this is your room, and you'll be safe here."

She felt like a mother comforting a frightened little one as his bottom lip quivered, and he shamelessly blinked back hot tears, "Do you promise?"

"I promise."

"You'll come back?"

The words struck a chord in her that rang painfully throughout her bones. Her most agonizing memory resurged to the forefront of her mind, reminding her why a bond existed between the two of them at all. So similar. So afraid to be alone. So lonely all the same.

She took his hand into two of hers and said the words that her parents had failed to act upon, "I'll come back."

***

 The soup she returned with ended up being too rich for his stomach, and she whispered soothing words into his ear and rubbed the spot between his shoulder blades as he retched in the 'fresher. He started to cry after the soup had all violently made its way back up, leaving him with painful dry heaves. Once everything had settled and after thorough convincing, he accepted small bites of a salty and brittle type of bread. Poe had poked his head into the door after a while and eyed the pair of them warily.

Rey dusted herself off and gestured for Ben to continue slowly eating. Poe looked over her shoulder and studied the tall man hunched over bread. 

"How's he been?"

Rey sighed, speaking low, "The soup didn't take. I think I was being too optimistic."

Poe nodded, "You've got to be careful with that. He won't be able to eat much for a while. It could kill him."

"I know how starvation works," she snapped before relenting with a shallow sigh, "sorry."

The pilot smiled apprehensively, "No, you're right. You're the most capable for the job."

She tilted her head curiously, "I'll admit, Dameron, I'm a little surprised. You don't seem like the type to care or at least have mercy on someone like him. I thought maybe it was for my sake that you were keeping him alive, and once I got on scene, you'd just leave me to it. It doesn't seem like that to me now."

They both turned to check on the 'him' in question before pivoting back to their quiet conversation, "I used to know Ben. My family was a part of the Republic. Before he left for training with his uncle, we were," he paused as he considered the label he was about to bestow on their younger selves, "we were friends. Sort of. He was younger, and sometimes we were all the other had in the wake of meetings and politics and we mostly didn't talk, but before everything, I knew him."

"I remember," said a sullen voice from the floor.

There was no judgement in Poe's voice when he spoke to him, "You didn't seem to on Jakku. You ripped out my memories."

For a moment, Ben's expression reminded Rey of the scholarly look he'd had during the first moments of the force bond, and it was the most lucid he'd been since his return, "I'm not sure if I did. What was good of my young life was mostly corrupted by Snoke to deepen my connection to the Dark. My father helped put some of the memories back together in my dreams after," he didn't finish his sentence, instead he shyly went back to breaking off miniscule bites of the crumbling bread. 

The two nodded with hesitant sympathy, but he refused to look back up at them, ignoring them to the best of his ability. He seemed thoughtful to the pair of Resistance fighters, and Poe, fearing he had overstayed his welcome with the fragile creature, quietly and promptly took his leave with a formal nod in Rey's direction. 

"My mother..." Ben trailed off, and Rey blanched.

He raised his head and looked her in the eye, those eyes, which had seemed so lifeless until that moment to Rey, seemed to peer into her very soul. _Timeless, he is timeless. He exists in every particle of space between nebulas and dying stars alike. He is the Force, so old and so young. He is the in-between of everything. No wonder he's so sad. He has the sadness that only people who have lived whole lifetimes can possess. The sadness of outliving._

"My mother has forsaken me."

Rey snapped from her reverie in his burning gaze and fervently shook her head, "No, she hasn't."

"She hates me."

" _No_."

"As she should."

"She doesn't hate you."

He tilted his head a fraction of a degree, like a planet off its axis, a crack in the balance that knits all things together and leaves corroding destruction in the irreparably changed atmosphere, "Then why hasn't she come to see me?"

It was funny how irony worked. Though Rey said nothing, she revealed everything. _The sadness of outliving._ A rushing wind from the lungs, a tremulous quaking on the surface, the darkening of the sky, all were signs of an incoming natural disaster. Ben stilled. He blinked. There were no tears for his mother. Rey was taken aback.

"I always thought I would be able to feel when it happened, but when I was closed off," he looked to her for something, anything, and nothing.

Rey brought him to his feet and into the bed, cocooning him in blankets, "Do you want to know?"

"Did anyone-"

"No. She passed in her sleep. Months ago."

Anger flashed dangerously in his eyes, "He took away my right to mourn."

"Hux?"

_Yes._

"Don't think about him anymore."

"Is he dead?"

_Yes._

_Good._

***

Over the course of a month or so, Ben grew accustomed to falling asleep with her hand held between his own, beneath his cheek on the pillow. When he would fall asleep, Rey would slip away to her own room and speculate on the progress made. There was one thing she feared as his progress became notably slower. She could see it in the way that he looked at her when she visited him for lunch, and she suspected that had very little to do with the food she brought him. Sometimes he would entwine his fingers with hers as they made casual conversation. He made desperate attempts for her to spend all her time with him by asking her volleys of questions that she doubted the answer was something he really cared about, but he always listened. If the bond opened while she was about, he always stopped what he was doing in favor of silently watching her motions with a curious eye. He planned his day around her visits, and she knew this because he always seemed to be waiting for her when she arrived. When Finn arrived on base for reprieve from the front lines, his progress especially slowed as he reverted back to his old anger and distrust, and when she returned to him after visiting Finn, he would always ask what they had discussed with a tone of bitterness and -dare she say it- jealousy. 

The most alarming was the writing. He had confessed to her that the one thing that always made him feel at ease was to put ink to paper, something Rey was entirely unfamiliar with, having been raised knowing only the power of technology. It was difficult to find the items he had described, but Poe had helped her pull strings off other planets that produced the materials, and she had managed to present them to him as a gift. She had hoped it would become a kind of coping mechanism for when the nightmares startled him awake, and he would not have to depend on her for comfort but take his recovery into his own hands quite literally. Then as she left him asleep at night, she read them. The penmanship was remarkable and she had never known the power there was in  _writing._ However, they were poems and declarations. The lightness of them had given her hope until she had realized their full meanings.

It wasn't that she could not see herself caring for him in such a way. In fact, she almost predicted that one day she would, simply from the connection they shared, but it wasn't the time. As Rey pondered how she would handle the situation if such a problem arose from the foot of her cot, she heard the bond open. Without breaking her eye contact with the wall, she smiled softly in greeting and gestured for him to sit beside her. Her heart sunk and her smile faded when he stiffly came to stand in front of her with a face that told her everything he was going to say regardless of if she could hear it through the bond or not. 

She could feel the waves of agitation unwittingly beating against the back of her mind, and she could feel every nervous tick that overcame him as he struggled to find the right words to say to her. His forefinger and thumb brushed against each other in a fidgeting fashion, and his left eye was just barely twitching. She could feel his heart beating recklessly against his weakened bones as if it were her heart and her strained and aching chest. His lips were parted but often would snap closed, and he would contort them in a way that she would have found endearing were it not the pity that his situation caused her to feel. Rey stood up, and he winced ever so slightly at the suddenness of her movement. 

He began with whisper, " _Rey_ ," and then he shut his mouth again, unable to put his many thoughts into words, but she could hear his thoughts and didn't need his words.

His thoughts swirled around her with gratifying compliments, affectionate endearments, and even some darker thoughts of passion that put a blush on the both of their cheeks. _Beautiful. Sunshine. Beloved._

Rey shook her head, and his face crumpled and dropped to his chest. She rushed forward to grab the sides of his head and force him to look at her while she spoke, though perhaps that was a torture even Hux hadn't thought of. To stare into the face of someone who cannot feel what he feels.

She crooned as salty tears shamelessly spilled down his cheeks and over where her fingers pressed against him, "It isn't healthy, Ben. Please understand. You have to heal first. When you're better and you can be sure that it isn't just because I'm all you have left, then you tell me. Not now."

He repeated in a pained whisper, "When I'm better," and her heart lurched at the shameful glints of hope in his eyes.

Rey nodded and whispered back, "Yes, tell me then."

The bond broke and her fingers held nothing but air. She could go to him, but she was afraid.


End file.
